


I Know Where I Want To Go

by psalmoflife



Series: Road To Joy [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Abuse, Clint is not the abuser, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Past Abuse, Read the warnings, References to Domestic Violence, Violence, Violence against women
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-26
Updated: 2013-05-26
Packaged: 2017-12-13 00:35:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/817876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psalmoflife/pseuds/psalmoflife
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes you escape your past. And sometimes your past comes back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Know Where I Want To Go

**Author's Note:**

> TRIGGER WARNING: this story (and this series) deals with Darcy moving on from a past abusive relationship. The abusive ex makes an appearance in this story, as does lots of emotional fallout and trauma. I'm not using archive warnings because there is no non-con or GRAPHIC violence, but please proceed with caution. 
> 
> I believe that I've tagged everything trigger-y, but if I haven't, someone please tell me.

“I’ve been thinking of getting a tattoo.”

Clint makes a humming noise, quiet enough that the only reason she hears it is that his lips are so close to her ear from the way her head is resting on his shoulder.

He doesn’t ask where, or of what, because one of the (many, many) things she loves about him is his quiet acceptance.

They’re out on the balcony, watching the moving streams of white and red lights as traffic zooms by, and the Fourth of July fireworks in the distance. It’s two years now that she’s been living in the Tower, three-and-a-bit since she left Boston, so far removed from Harvard that she can hardly believe it, often goes days at a time without thinking about Before.

This finally feels like her life.

\---

“What are you wearing to the expo gala?”

Darcy looks up from the coffee maker, utterly befuzzled. “Um. A dress?”

Clint huffs, trudging over to steal the cup of coffee from her hands before she can doctor it up. “I know that. Natasha says I have to ask what color.”

Darcy laughs with dawning realization. “She’s going with you to get your tux, isn’t she?”

“This isn’t funny,” Clint says- she thinks. There’s half a donut in his mouth so it’s a little hard to be sure. “I’m probably going to come back with a terrible haircut and a pin permanently embedded in my ass.”

Darcy can’t stop laughing, which has Clint looking increasingly annoyed until she hands him another donut. “Natasha knows what I’m wearing, she went with me to buy it.”

Clint gives a heartfelt sigh. “Apparently me asking you is some kind of rite of passage.”

Darcy pauses. “Are you going to show up with a corsage?”

“It’s funny that you think I have a choice.”

There’s a stern-sounding knock at the door before Natasha marches in, raising an expectant eyebrow at Clint. Darcy had planned to hold out a little longer, but Clint’s ‘help me!’ look and the rather spiky heels on Natasha’s feet have her saying “Red. It’s red.”

\---

Clint does not have a terrible haircut or a pin embedded in his ass. (Darcy checked.) He’s convinced that he looks ridiculous in the tux Natasha made him buy, but Darcy has received texts to the contrary from both Nat and Bruce (who was also there, for some reason) so she’s pretty sure he’s just cranky at the way it restricts his movement.

When Clint is cranky he gets cuddly, so she’s sitting on the couch watching _Firefly_ with his head in her lap. Every time she stops running her fingers through his hair, he grumbles a little and opens one eye to glare at her, so she keeps going, interspersing the petting with occasional scratches of her nails on his scalp. It’s kind of like having a really big cat.

“I love you,” she murmurs.

“Love you, too.”

\---

Natasha shows up at the crack of dawn on the day of the gala to take Darcy to get ready.

She has really unfortunate timing, since they had been up rather late the night before and hadn’t gotten around to putting their pajamas back on. She’s smart enough not to come into their bedroom, but she stands in the living room and yells loudly, and it’s really very distracting, especially once she gets Jarvis in on it and the lights start flashing on and off.

“I’m going to kill her, seriously,” Clint grits out into Darcy’s neck.

“You can go back to sleep,” Darcy points out. “I have to go play dress-up.”

Clint stills, pulls back to give her a serious look. “We don’t have to go to this thing if you don’t want,” he says. “Or you can go in jeans, Tony won’t care.”

It’s partly a cop-out to save himself from the tux, but also partly that he’s really worried that _she’s_ worried about being in the crowd, and she ignores Natasha’s threats to pull him into a kiss. “I’ll see you tonight, handsome.”

\---

Getting ready is surprisingly not terrible.

Natasha had apparently been sent by Pepper, who wanted them all out of the tower before Tony woke up and started making a ruckus, and since Pepper doesn’t do anything by halves there’s a whole group of women affiliated with SHIELD and Stark Industries collectively getting pampered and drinking mimosas.

There’s a handful of men who work at the spa, but none of them are ever assigned to work on Darcy. She’s not sure if it’s a coincidence or if Natasha’s running interference, but either way, she’s grateful. With Susan’s help she’s accepted that touches from strange men will probably always make her feel uncomfortable, and that’s okay, but she’s still working on vocalizing her need for a female beautician or tailor.

(She hadn’t realized how much other people took casual touches for granted until after her time at Harvard, when even the smallest brush made her jump. Now… well, she does okay with other women, and it’s okay when it’s a guy she knows, like Clint or Phil or Thor. Guys she doesn’t know still make her jump, even though she knows they’re probably not going to hurt her, and she still feels a little ashamed of her flinches sometimes, even though Susan says she shouldn’t.)

Somewhere in between facials and pedicures, Pepper’s jeweler shows up and starts handing out velvet boxes. He hands Darcy a pair of earrings and a bracelet, then walks over to Jane. Darcy’s frowning down at the box when Natasha comes over. “Something wrong?”

“I thought you said my dress needed a necklace?”

“It does.” Natasha pats her on the shoulder. “You’ll get it later.”

\---

Later happens when Darcy runs upstairs just before the start of the gala to switch out the shoes Natasha had handed her for a pair she can actually walk in. She can hear Clint swearing up a storm in the bathroom, and finally curiosity gets the better of her, even though she’s pretty sure they’re meant to have a staircase moment later.

“Tie problems?” she asks, leaning against the doorframe.

Clint’s eyes meet hers for a moment in the mirror before his annoyed expression falls away and he turns to look at her properly. She waits for him to say something, starts to fidget a little under his gaze, but he just reaches one arm forward and tugs on her hand to draw her close.

“You look amazing,” he says, brushing his lips over her forehead.

“So do you.” She uses the loose ends of his tie to tug him down for a proper kiss. “Even if you can’t put all your clothes on.”

“Ties are hard,” he complains. “Do you know how to tie one of these?”

“Nope. You could just go down without one.”

Clint snorts. “Only if you want to take bets on who kills me first. My money’s on Phil.” He traces one finger along her collarbone. “And you’re under-dressed too.”

“According to Natasha, I’m getting it ‘later.’”

“Does now work?” he asks, pulling a blue box out of his pocket.

“I guess,” she whispers, taking it from him. She holds it for a moment, running her thumbnail over the edge of the box, before tugging on the white ribbon bow and pulling off the lid.

She can tell right away that Natasha had no hand in picking out the necklace, a silver chain with a drop pendant of three diamonds. It’s beautiful, and simple, and at least ten karats smaller than what anyone else will be wearing.

It’s perfect for Darcy.

She slides the necklace out of the box and hands it to Clint, turning away from him and scooping her curls up out of the way. He drags his fingertips along her shoulders after he’s done fiddling with the clasp, presses a kiss on the back of her neck as his hands drop down to her waist.

She isn’t sure how long they stand there, watching each other in the mirror while she leans back against him, before a familiar rapping at the door makes Clint roll his eyes. “Go away, Nat!” he calls.

“You!” Natasha hisses, stalking into the (now rather crowded) bathroom. “You were supposed to stay downstairs.”

Darcy shrugs. “I needed my necklace.” She decides it’s best not to mention the shoes.

Natasha’s eyes soften for a moment, before she notices Clint. “And you! Why aren’t you fully dressed?”

“I need help with my tie,” he answers, pouting a little. Natasha gives a long-suffering sigh and nudges Darcy out of the way, yanking the fabric into a knot around his neck. When Clint pretends to choke she hisses something at him in Russian.

Darcy knows why she’s being so stern about everything – she’s still annoyed about Hammer’s ability to infiltrate the expo a few years back, and is determined for everything to be perfect this time – so she just shrugs when Natasha catches sight of her lower heels.

“I give up,” Natasha says, heading for the elevator.

“Finally.” Clint’s laughing a little as he offers Darcy his arm. “Ready?”

She grins back, looping her arm through his. “Ready.”

\---

The gala is… kind of boring.

It’s attended by a bunch of people who build robots and spaceships for a living, so Darcy had been hoping for some live demonstrations or something, but mostly it’s a bunch of people geeking out about new alloys and fuel cells while they cluster in little groups around the edges of the dance floor.

(The dinner is pretty awesome, at least. She has no idea who Tony gets to cater these things, but it’s honest-to-goodness the best meal she’s had in her entire life, and there’s an interesting-looking dessert bar being set up in the corner.)

Clint gets sucked into a conversation about quivers and arrowheads, which loses Darcy in about the first thirty seconds, especially when she notices Phil sitting alone. He’s at the “SHIELD Bigwigs Table,” also known as Fury and those Pepper trusted to behave around Fury, but everyone else has disappeared and he’s poking at his phone.

Clint gives her an absent-minded smile when she gets up. Phil gives her slightly raised eyebrows, which she thinks is the Phil equivalent for terrified.

“Can I help you, Ms. Lewis?”

“Um.” Darcy doesn’t actually have a good reason for coming over here – she doesn’t think ‘you looked lonely’ will go over well – so she looks around the room, looking for an answer. “Will you dance with me?”

His eyebrows go a trifle higher. “Isn’t that Agent Barton’s job?”

“He’s trying to get that guy to design him a boomerang arrow.”

Phil sighs, quickly making a note in his phone (which she bets is a reminder to cancel that contract tomorrow). “Very well.”

They turn in slow circles on the dance floor, Darcy carefully holding her skirt up out of the way of her shoes, and are eventually joined by Pepper and Tony, and Natasha and Bruce, as the dance floor fills up. She can still see Clint, though, leaning against their table, and every so often he meets her eyes and smiles.

“He loves you, you know.”

Phil’s voice in her ear makes her jump a little, and he steadies her with the hand on her waist. She flushes a little before smiling up at him. “I know. He’s… yeah. I know. I love him, too.”

“He’s also oddly tight-lipped about you.”

Darcy’s brow furrows. “I don’t… what do you mean?”

“Agent Barton rather enjoys talking,” he says. “Usually in my office while I’m trying to work. But he seems to be keeping you to himself.”

“He knows I don’t like talking about my personal life, much,” she says. “Not that I mind talking about Clint, but there have been other things, and I – I don’t like talking about things in my past.”

He smiles, looking fonder than she’s ever seen. “Everyone has a past, Ms. Lewis. But you shouldn’t let that dictate your future.”

She’s still thinking about that a few minutes later when a familiar hand taps on Phil’s shoulder. “Mind if I cut in?”

Phil immediately drops her hand and backs up, inclining his head slightly before heading back to his table.

Darcy sniffs. “We were having a perfectly nice time.”

Clint grins, pulling her against his chest. “That’s the problem. He doesn’t like anyone to know he’s a big softie.”

“He said something about you baring your soul to him in his office?”

Clint laughs a little, his chest rumbling under her cheek. “Yeah, he likes to pretend to have professional distance, but really he likes knowing anything that might help the team work better. He thinks you’re good for me.”

“Oh?”

“Apparently you give me structure.”

Darcy’s brow furrows. “What the hell does that mean?”

“That he doesn’t worry about me going rogue anymore because he knows I’d never leave you.”

Darcy’s face is flushing red, she can tell, and all of a sudden she’s sniffling back tears, burying her face into Clint’s chest. He brings her right hand up to his shoulder and wraps both arms around her waist. They’re still swaying to the music a bit, could technically still be considered dancing, but just barely.

“Sorry,” she finally whispers, “Sorry, I don’t know what’s wrong with me today. I think- I think it’s just starting to sink in that this is real, you know? That this is my life now.”

And the thing is, she knows he gets it. They’ve had enough fumbled conversations about his past, staring into the darkness in the middle of the night, that she knows this kind of permanency is new to him, too.

That maybe the best part about finding each other is that their relationship is whole, even though they know parts of their individual selves are broken.

\---

At some point the band switches over to something faster, a little jazzy, and after three collisions in the first minute they leave the dance floor to people who actually know how to dance.

Clint is almost immediately waylaid by another set of scientists who want to make him something, and Darcy waves off his sheepish smile and heads for the bar.

The benefit to dating a superhero, she decides, is that the bartender remembers which brand of scotch Clint’s been drinking.

She’s sipping on a glass of champagne, waiting for the bartender to unearth a clean rocks glass, when she hears a snake-oil voice behind her.

“Well, well, well. If it isn’t the runaway.”

She thinks she’s hallucinating, thinks there’s no way that it can possibly be what she thinks, but then she turns around, and it is.

It’s Him.

“I figured you’d turn up eventually,” He says, stepping closer and reaching behind her to leave his empty glass on the bar. “I was starting to worry about you. You know you can’t take care of yourself.”

Darcy can barely hear Him over the pounding in her ears. She’s vaguely aware of the bartender behind her, trying to hand her Clint’s drink, but she feels utterly frozen in place, all the pain and memories coming back in one fell swoop. She knows that He’s still talking, can see His mouth moving, but her body doesn’t start working again until His hand closes around her upper arm, squeezing so hard she thinks she can feel the bones grinding together.

Everything shakes loose at once, all the ambient noise of the gala and the bartender’s exclamation of surprise, and everything Susan has told her and Darcy learned in her self-defense class surges through her, bringing her free arm up and into His face.

She can’t quite make a fist around the champagne flute in her hand, but her nails crunch into her palm anyway as the glass breaks, sending shards slicing through her hand and His cheekbone. Blood tracks down His face as Darcy stares in shock, the tunnel vision causing her to miss His return swing.

She stumbles backwards into the bar, losing her balance as she skids through the spilled champagne, and the last thing she remembers is watching the ceiling move farther away as the back of her head slams into the floor.

\---

Waking back up is like being at the bottom of a lake and swimming towards the surface. She can hear voices in the background, but can’t identify words, or who is talking. She can see a spot of light, but she can’t tell if it’s the sun or a light in the ceiling or if her vision is still dancing.

She starts swimming a little faster when her brain starts sending on signals of pain, needlebursts in her left hand and right arm, and a general throbbing in her head that is pulsing with her heartbeat.

She tries to sit up but only manages to get one shoulder up before the voices get louder, hands coming from all sides to push her back down. Somewhere in the back of her head she knows that it’s her friends, that they don’t want her to hurt herself, but she can’t stop herself from thinking that it’s Him pushing her back down into their old bed-

“Back off,” a sharp voice orders, and Darcy relaxes a little when she recognizes Natasha. The hands, mercifully, move away. “Darcy, can you hear me?”

Darcy’s voice doesn’t seem to be working, but she manages to push her chin down towards her chest and back up.

“You shouldn’t sit up on your own yet, but we can tilt the bed up, if you want?”

Darcy manages another nod attempt, and the bed she’s in – apparently a hospital bed – starts to angle upwards, pushing her into a mostly-sitting position. She blinks her eyes open to see Natasha, Jane, and Thor, all watching her with carefully blank expressions, and a nurse who is writing something on her chart.

“Where’s-”

“Shh, little shield-maiden,” Thor says. “Your healer left instructions that you are to rest.”

“But-”

“He’s right, honey,” the nurse says, moving forward to shine a small flashlight in Darcy’s eyes. “You’re not hurt too badly, but you need to lay still.”

Darcy pulls a face, but leans back against the pillows. The nurse continues to check her vitals while Natasha furrows her brow at something on her phone. Jane looks like she wants to say something, but is restraining herself. Thor is just calm. For as much as he used to make Darcy anxious, he seems to be lowering the nervous energy in the room. He’s not there to worry, or to judge, he’s just… there.

The nurse does something to the IV feeding into the back of her hand, and Darcy feels herself nodding off again. The last thing she sees before she drops off is a satisfied smile on Natasha’s face.

\---

When she wakes up again Susan and Phil are sitting on either side of her bed. Something clicks that she was too fuzzy to notice before.

“Everyone knows now, huh?”

“Not quite,” Phil says mildly. “Most everyone is currently under the impression that he was simply someone who found you attractive and wouldn’t take no for an answer. We’re prepared to encourage that impression.”

Darcy glances over at Susan. “I don’t understand.”

“I received the results of your background check when you came to work here, which indicated active attempts to prevent contact from a man with whom you had previously lived,” he says. “There are other explanations, of course, but the simplest answer is usually correct.”

“Agent Barton and myself know because you’ve shared things with us.” Susan’s brow furrows a bit. “I’m not entirely sure what you’ve told Agent Romanov, but she’s rather perceptive.”

Darcy thinks through that for a minute. “So only the four of you know what really happened?”

“Yes.”

“And if I want to tell everyone else?”

Susan and Phil both give her searching looks. “That’s your choice,” Susan finally says.

Her choice.

Darcy thinks about that for a while. In many ways, the idea of having any kind of choice relative to Him is still very, very strange. She’s not sure if revealing the truth to everyone else would be freeing, or just bring up her past more often.

“I need to think about it more,” she says. She looks around the room, but doesn’t see her purse, or her phone. “Where’s Clint?”

“The police station,” Phil says.

Darcy stares blankly at him. “What?”

“The waitstaff were all carrying panic buttons in case someone tried to attack the expo again,” he says. “The bartender hit his when the confrontation started. NYPD must have been waiting outside because they made it inside before it ended.”

Darcy can’t stop staring. “Clint got arrested.”

“Only temporarily,” Phil says. “Thanks to the multiple witnesses who independently stated that he stepped in to defend you, we expect he’ll be let go with minimal consequence. His unpaid parking tickets, however…”

Darcy thinks her mouth might be gaping open. “Did you just make a joke?” she finally asks.

Phil sighs. “Evidently not a very good one.”

Darcy smiles, a little watery. “I appreciate the thought.” Her voice is scratchy, and she thinks she’s starting to shake, suddenly feeling the air conditioning. “I don’t- I can’t believe this is happening again.”

“It’s not,” Susan says, handing her a glass of water from the side table. “Darcy, take a deep breath. This is not happening again.”

The water helps to slow her breathing, but doesn’t stop the shaking, and Phil scoots a little closer to wrap a blanket around her. The action brings back even older memories, of her dad tucking her back in after a nightmare, and she can’t help herself reaching out for his hand, bringing it back to her shoulder. She realizes a moment later, lets go of his hand with a bright flush, but Phil just pulls her in for a tentative hug.

He wears the same aftershave as her dad, and the familiar smell brings up the tears she’s been fighting back since she woke up the first time. She’s vaguely aware that she’s probably ruining his jacket, but he hasn’t let her go, is stroking a soothing hand up and down her back, and she just sits and cries.

\---

At some point she must have cried herself out and nodded off at Phil’s shoulder, because she wakes up to sunlight streaming in the windows and Clint sitting next to her bed. His head is tipped over onto his shoulder, and he’s drooling a little bit.

His knuckles are scraped up.

She doesn’t know how to feel about that.

His fingers start twitching the way they always do when he’s awake but not ready to get up, so Darcy forces her mouth open and asks, “Long night?”

Clint shoots upright, swiping the back of his hand across his mouth, and Darcy can’t help but laugh a little before everything sets back in. He gives her a long look – she thinks that the immediate future is going to be full of people just watching her – and says, “Not too bad. You?”

She snorts, because she can’t help it, and says, “I think I cried on Agent Coulson, but I don’t really remember.”

One side of Clint’s mouth tips up. “Yeah, he mentioned that.” He pauses for a moment, fiddling with the strings on his hoodie. “Are you- how do you feel?”

“I don’t know.”

And that’s the thing of it all: she really doesn’t.

“Is it okay that I’m here?”

Her first reaction is to ask him why he would even ask that – she always wants him around, they’re living together – and then she thinks about all the times that she _didn’t_ want him around, back when the panic attacks were more frequent, back when she thought of Him more days than she didn’t.

“I don’t want to go backwards,” she finally says.

He starts to say something else, but she cuts him off. “Can you just- come here, please?”

She slides over to the far side of her bed, makes enough room for him to squeeze in next to her. There are tight lines between his eyebrows, but he lets her arrange his limbs and prop herself up on his shoulder.

They’ll have to talk eventually, she knows, but for now she just wants to close her eyes and try to forget.

\---

She spends the next few days avoiding the important questions, until finally Natasha shows up with muffins and hot chocolate and sits her down.

“He was violating the terms of his probation for a similar incident when he came after you,” she says. “So he’s in all kinds of trouble, and between the CCTV footage and all the people who talked to the police when you were still passed out, you won’t have to testify.” There’s a long silence, while Darcy picks at a muffin and just… processes. “The lawyers want to know if you want to put in for a restraining order.”

Darcy takes a deep breath in through her nose, lets it out through her mouth. Thinks about everything that’s happened, everything she wants to happen. “Yeah. Let’s do it.”

\---

“I think I’m handling this better than he is.”

Phil has his chin propped up in one hand and is absorbed in something on his monitor, has mostly been making non-committal noises, but that gets him to look over at her. “What makes you say that?”

“He’s avoiding me. He took a bunch of stuff and moved back to his old room, and he’s come to some of my appointments with Susan but he won’t _say_ anything, he just looks at his feet and rushes out afterwards.” She reaches up to her collar, runs her fingers over the necklace that she hasn’t taken off. “Do you think he’s going to break up with me?”

“No.”

“Has he said anything to you?”

“No, he hasn’t. But he has a history of avoiding potentially awkward situations if he’s worried about saying the wrong thing.” Phil takes a long sip of coffee, and says, “It’s possible he thinks you’ll break up with him.”

Darcy’s brow furrows. “Why would I do that?”

Phil stands up from his desk, moves around to sit next to her on the small couch wedged between two filing cabinets. “I’m not trying to put words in your mouth,” he says. “But you did go through something pretty traumatic. It would be perfectly understandable if you weren’t interested in being alone with a man for a while.”

“But I’m alone with you now,” Darcy points out.

Phil sighs. “Yes, well, it’s also perfectly understandable that you’re willing to be with men you trust. But evidently Barton doesn’t know how you’re feeling, and is afraid to ask.”

\---

Nightmares have become a regular occurrence.

She thinks that she’s dealing with everything pretty well – certainly better than she would have a couple of years ago, or before she started seeing Susan – but she’s spent too many nights in terror to ever really be comfortable alone in the dark.

Darcy’s sort of used to it, didn’t sleep through a full night for the first year after she left Boston, but isn’t exactly glad to return to watching TV at ridiculous hours. (Though the cable package in the tower does mean she can watch something other than infomercials.)

Some nights she’s too antsy to stay in their (her?) room, and prowls around the common areas instead, flipping through left-out magazines and organizing the fridge. It’s often easier than laying in her bed and staring over at Clint’s pillow, and she’s holding out hope that his own insomnia will give them an opportunity to talk.

He makes an appearance when she’s absorbed in a Harry Potter re-read, the subtle shift in light making her look over her shoulder and jump at his proximity.

“Sorry,” he immediately says, backing up with his palms up. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to bother you. I’ll just- go.”

“Stay,” she says, more than a note of desperation in her voice. She thinks it’s her tone that makes him stop, though, so she’s not going to get herself under control just yet. “Please, stay. I want to talk to you.”

Clint hesitates a little before sitting on the opposite end of the couch, keeping his distance the way he did the first few months they were getting to know each other. “Yeah, I guess we need to talk about some things.”

He has a look on his face that she doesn’t really like, so she cuts off what he’s about to say next and blurts out “I want you to move back in.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

“Why?” She has a good idea why, but she wants to make him say it.

“I think you need your space.”

“You know I sleep better with you there,” she points out. “And- yeah, this has really sucked, but not having you to lean on is making this harder. And it’s going to keep sucking, and I’m going to be even more jumpy, but _I trust you_. And I need you to trust me to know my limits.”

He seems to need some time to think about that, so they sit in silence for several minutes, Darcy absentmindedly braiding and re-braiding her hair. “I do trust you,” he finally says. “And- god, I love you so much, more than I’ve ever loved anyone.” He makes a few false starts at his next words, his fingers twisting together. “Watching you work through everything when you first got here – all the nightmares, the panic attacks, the stuff you and Sean told me – Darce, I couldn’t live with myself if I thought I was getting in the way of you working through things this time.”

“Please stop making this about you.” They’re Susan’s words, a suggestion made in passing last week, but they’re exactly what she’s thinking. “I’m sure that was an awful night for you, too, and I think you should keep coming with me to see Susan, but this is not helping. If you’re not comfortable being together right now because of how _you_ feel about this, that’s fine, but you’re making all these assumptions about how _I_ feel, and what _I_ want, and you’re wrong. So how about you listen to what I’m telling you and come back to bed with me.”

Clint’s gaping at her open-mouthed by the time she’s done. It would be funny if she weren’t crying (again).

“Okay,” he says with a sigh. “Okay.”

\---

She doesn’t really know what his okays mean, but he follows her back to their room, slides back in to his side of the bed. He stays over there, which is unusual, but he doesn’t push Darcy away when she curls up against him, resting her head on his chest.

They’re in roughly the same position when she wakes up fourteen hours later, muscles stiff from being still for so long. One of Clint’s hands is slowly stroking over her back, playing with the ends of her hair.

“How long have you been up?” she mumbles.

“Not very. I, ah, haven’t been sleeping well either.”

She shifts backwards, propping herself up on an arm so they can make eye contact. “I’m sorry I yelled at you,” she whispers. “I’m not mad at you, I just wanted you here.”

“It’s okay,” he says. “I’m sorry I was projecting.” He shifts, back and up, so that he’s sitting up against the headboard. “My dad used to beat my mom.”

Darcy sits up then, too, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bed.

“I don’t think they would have had a very happy marriage anyway, they were so young when they got hitched, and my dad could never hold down a job. I never figured out if he was an alcoholic because of the unemployment, or the other way around, you know? But I guess she really loved him, or maybe she just didn’t know how to leave.”

Yeah. Darcy gets that.

“So we would hide in our bedroom, and I’d put my head under all the pillows so I couldn’t hear her crying, and I swore that I’d never hit anybody.” He smiles humorlessly. “Obviously I broke that promise. But I try to be a better man than my dad.”

“You are.” She reaches for his hand, squeezes it tight. “Clint, I’ve never once thought you were going to hurt me. You know that, right?”

He squeezes back, hard enough that she’ll probably lose circulation soon, but she’s missed this inter-weaving of fingers so much, she’s not going to complain. “I do – or I did – and then I couldn’t stop what happened to you at the gala, just jumped the guy and kept hitting him when he was down.”

She thinks about pointing out that she was unconscious for that part, but that doesn’t seem like an entirely helpful comment. “Clint, everyone keeps telling me that none of what happened is my fault, and this wasn’t your fault, either. No one could have predicted that he would show up, or come after me. It sucked, but I’m ready to move on. Or, well, try to move on.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”

\---

When they finish crying and finally make their way out of bed, Darcy sends an email to Susan, asking her to schedule more sessions with both Darcy and Clint, in addition to Darcy’s own appointments. After some thought, she emails Phil, too.

Clint’s in the kitchen, frying bacon and eggs, and she takes a moment to close her eyes and absorb the familiarity of their Saturday-morning routine. (Okay, it’s afternoon, but she figures it’s still an acceptable time for brunch.)

She finishes her first cup of coffee and stretches, pushing her hands together and up over her head, and realizes that Clint is giving her stomach a curious look, where the hemline of her shirt is riding up.

“I got my tattoo,” she says off-handedly.

He hesitates. “Can I see?”

She beckons him closer, pulling her shirt up and thumbing down the waistband of her shorts. Wrapped around the old beer bottle scar are two words in script: _still flying_.

He brings one finger up to trace over the words, sending shivers through her as her subconscious dredges up memories of his fingers and his kisses.

“It’s perfect.”

It is.

Her life is… well, it’s not perfect, but it’s better, and maybe that’s enough.

\---

_Now I don't know where I am_   
_I don't know where I've been_   
_But I know where I want to go_   
_And so I thought I'd let you know_   
_That these things take forever_   
_I especially am slow_   
_But I realize that I need you_   
_And I wondered if I could come home..._

**Author's Note:**

> And with this I come to the end of the planned timeline for Road to Joy. Thank you, thank you, thank you for reading, kudos-ing, commenting, and generally being a part of this journey. 
> 
> There IS one more story coming in this 'verse, as the winner of my AO3 auction requested Road to Joy from Clint's perspective, so that's next on the to-write list, for those interested. 
> 
> Title/end lyrics from "First Day Of My Life" by Bright Eyes.


End file.
